Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

coondoggie writes "By 2020, the Shackleton Energy Company says it intends to be operating the world's first lunar base and propellant depot for all manner of spacecraft. Shackleton stated that after a phase of robotic prospecting, its crews will establish the infrastructure in space and basecamps in the lunar polar crater regions to supervise industrial machinery for mining, processing and transporting lunar products to market in Low Earth Orbit and beyond. The company said it will use a mix of industrial astronauts and advanced robotic systems to provide a strategically-assured, continuous supply of propellants for spacecraft."

The latter is tricky when it sticks to just about everything. The only simple solution I've seen proposed is to use space suits that 'dock' with the habitat (i.e. you back up to an airlock, latch to it and climb out of the suit) rather than suits you put on or remove inside the habitat.

I think the latter would be tricky because, practically speaking, the lunar atmosphere is a vacuum.

Good luck breathing vacuum.

Which part of 'the dust sticks to just about everything' is proving hard to understand? The Apollo astronauts said that the LEM's interior was covered in dust after a few spacewalks and smelled like gunpowder because they were breathing it in all the time after it fell off their dust-covered suits. They also had to continually clean it off the Lunar Rover's radiator so it wouldn't overheat.

This is one of the biggest problems with living on the Moon, not a silly joke.

It isn't just the deep connections that these guys have with NASA and elements of the space industry. It is the fact that they have already done several projects for NASA and other federal agencies, as well as some private foundation grants and even some work with for-profit companies. This TED talk [ted.com] shows some of the more impressive things that Bill Stone (one of the major investors in Shackleton Energy) has done and at least one other crazy off-the-wall idea that has a real shot at being built some time in the future.

This is a very legitimate group and of anybody who says they might be able to get to the Moon and make a profit off of what they are doing on the Moon, these guys would be it. The market for propellant from a location near the Moon would certainly be a valuable market, considering that a 1 liter bottle of water currently costs about $20,000 just to get it there with current rockets.

In this case, while I'm sure that they wouldn't mind having NASA/USAF/NRO/ESA/Roscosmos/JAXA as customers, there might be some other potential customers for their product as well. It isn't purely for government contracts. It does take a different attitude about how you go about launching stuff into space, however.

The moon buggy didn't have to work for very long, and even then it had serious issues with abrasive dust. They almost had to abort the use of the buggy on one mission because the fender got snapped off, which would have caused dust to fly everywhere (duct tape saved the day though). The dust on the moon hasn't been worn into relatively smooth shapes by thousands of years of erosion. It's sharp edged, extremely fine particles that gets everywhere. The buggies wouldn't have been operational after a month of activity on the surface, let alone the years it will take to develop an infrastructure on the surface of the moon.